Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
